Ethan Hawke has revealed that his good buddy Oscar Isaac convinced him to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hawke is set to appear in the Moon Knight TV series where he’ll be playing Arthur Harrow; a villainous but charismatic cult leader who encourages the titular hero to “choose chaos.”
When the news broke that Hawke was joining the MCU, many people were surprised that he’d hitch his wagon to an action movie franchise factory like Marvel. Now though, the four-time Academy Award nominee has revealed it was the involvement of Oscar Isaac that convinced him to embrace his inner supervillain.
“I was always a little apprehensive; there’s a certain kind of actor that really excels in that universe, and I’m still not sure I’m one of them. But then Oscar asked me, and I really respect him,” Hawke told Entertainment Weekly. “I knew that if he went in, he was going to go all in, and it’s fun to do any genre with people who are all in. Mohamed Diab, I really like his films, he’s a special director. So it just became about the project, and it wasn’t an intellectual decision at all; it was like, ‘Oh, let’s do something cool with these guys.'”
Once he’d signed up through, Hawke found that Moon Knight was a character that spoke to him in a way other superheroes just didn’t. “The more I learned about the Moon Knight, the more turned on I got, because it’s so much better than trying to create something that the audience already has a big agenda with,” he said. “Like, if you do Batman or Superman or Hulk, any of these famous ones, the fans have so many preconceived things that they want from it.”
Hawke compares the experience to playing Hamlet. A lot of audiences have seen Hamlet, and they go in with preconceptions of what Hamlet is. With Moon Knight, there aren’t those expectations, so as Hawke puts it, “we get to create a world and a character.”
Moon Knight is part of Marvel’s Phase 4 and will stream exclusively on Disney Plus. If you want to know more about the MCU’s upcoming TV series, check out our Ms Marvel guide for everything you need to know about Kamala Khan’s small screen outing.